4 Knowledge Shifts for Global Leaders with Elisa Mallis and Dr. Cynthia Cherrey

Elisa Mallis is currently the Global Vice President of Global Research, Innovation and New Content Creation at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®), a top-ranked global provider of executive education. The organization uses research to develop people into better leaders, transforming individuals, teams, organizations, and societies.

She has over 20 years of experience as a business leader focused on transformational change, human capital strategy, and sales and marketing. She is known for her ability to successfully blend a focus on purpose and values with practical actions and results. Growing up between countries, Greece and the United States, her journey has taken her to work and live in 16 different countries, with the last 17+ years based in Asia, including Beijing, Sydney, and Singapore.

Dr. Cynthia Cherrey is President and CEO of the International Leadership Association (ILA), a global community committed to increasing quality research, teaching, and leadership practices contributing to the world's common good. As president of a multi-sector and global professional association, she promotes rigor and relevance of leadership at the intersection of theory and practice. Previously, Cynthia was Lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Vice President for Campus Life at Princeton University.  

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “Leadership has become more of a team sport.” 
• “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.” 
• “Leadership is becoming less about having all the answers and more about being able to say, ‘I don’t know.’” 
• “We need to double down on human connection.” 

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

• Article: Moving Beyond the Why: 4 Knowledge Shifts for Global Leaders by Mallis and Hardy

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. 

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Transcript

Scott Allen: [00:00:00] Okay everybody. Welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in today. I have Cynthia Cherrey and I have Elisa Mallis, and we are gonna have a fun conversation. This is a conversation all about, in many ways, partnerships. So sin, why don't you share a little bit about you, and then we will introduce Elisa and then we'll talk about what's going on.

Cyn Cherrey: Scott, it is good to be here again. It's always a pleasure to be on your podcast. I'm Cynthia Cherry, I am president and CEO of the International Leadership Association, which is the largest membership based association for all those who are interested in the study. The practice and the teaching of leadership or Scott as we talk about it in terms of leader development and leadership development.

Scott Allen: Yes. 

Cyn Cherrey: So it's good to be here. 

Scott Allen: Thank you. And an organization near and dear to my heart, my academic home for decades now. [00:01:00] And Elisa, another organization near and dear to my heart. I'll share why in a little bit, but tell us about you. 

Elisa Mallis: Thank you so much for having us, Scott. Yes. I am working for the Center for Creative Leadership in the role of global Vice President of Research innovation and new content creation.

And actually I'm based in Singapore. I have been with the center for longer than I've been in this role. In fact, I started off seven, eight years ago looking after the business in Asia Pacific as the Asia Pacific managing Director. For those who know CCL, we have been around for more than five decades.

Leadership is all we do. Focus, especially on evidence-based research and also deliver programs in leadership all over the world, including here in Asia where I'm based. 

Scott Allen: You know what, Cynthia McCauley was on my dissertation committee. Oof. 

Elisa Mallis: Oh wow.

Scott Allen: Yeah. Oh, [00:02:00] she was incredible. She was. It go 

Elisa Mallis: well. 

Scott Allen: Yes, and I was so lucky to have her on the podcast as well a few years back now, but have had several CCL guests over the years and so just an organization that I think the world of, so there's a partnership going on.

Sin. Would you talk a little bit about ILA and CCL and kind of what we're up to here? 

Cyn Cherrey: One of the things that we've been really working on in deep conversations is around the whole concept of global leadership. And the ILA has done a series of events and gatherings and convenings to talk about that.

And, we all know that the study of global leadership is still fairly new. We also know that people think about it differently. Some look at global leadership from. The context and the culture of a place and others think about global leadership as this global process or a global mindset.

And so the ILA brought together a [00:03:00] series of convenings to talk about this and explore the concept. Such as we brought together the Yale world leaders to talk about their experiences and we connected them with leadership scholars to talk about it. Another one we did was with multilateral institutions in Geneva.

So the World Health Organization, the Inter Parliamentary Union, all of those who have this global concept to talk about their challenges. And we also wanted to do something specifically in Asia with global leaders and particularly with a business perspective. And one of the ILA board members is and works for CCL and is a senior position.

And David Altman said, sin, you have got to meet Elisa. And I was doing the keynote over in Tokyo, and so I hopped over to Singapore to [00:04:00] meet with Elisa and her team. And the very first meeting we had as we were sitting down be before Elisa was able to join us, we were talking about the ILA and one of the CCL members says, my favorite.

Resource that the ILA has is NICs Scott Allen's podcast. I listened to it. Every new episode that comes out 

Scott Allen: nice. 

Cyn Cherrey: And so it was just fortuitous that we got together. And this partnership has really grown and blossomed and through a number of different projects that I'm really excited for Elisa and I to talk about today.

Scott Allen: Elisa, why don't you share a couple of those projects with us? What do we have cooking here? 

Elisa Mallis: Yeah. First I just wanna mention Scott, that Cindy McCauley I heard about just a few days ago, in addition to you mentioning her today for a dissertation of [00:05:00] A-C-H-R-O in India. So we were in India last week hosting senior leader round tables in three cities.

At the end of the last one in Delhi. I was just so surprised. Actually it was the second one we had in Mumbai and we were having the dinner and she told me this story about how her dissertation was all around the concept of directional alignment, commitment, A-Q-C-C-L model. Yeah. And how helpful Cindy au and response if she was such a.

Interesting global connection and a testament to how our work has really reached all parts of the world. And so in, in the connection with ILA and I also wanna just mention that, ccls had a long history with the ILA, including the Kenneth Clark Award, honoring a former CCL President, many pieces.

And in the kind of connection that Dave Altman made. As. Cynthia and Mark Hardy and others from the ILA were looking at really [00:06:00] expanding the work to include an Asian point of view, especially having done the work really mainly in the US and. In Europe a couple pieces of our research one of them is called the Global Asian Leader, really got their attention and we were doing that work from 2018 and 2022, really trying to look at leadership through an Asian lens.

And then also had a, a. Focus over the last couple years around the work in the area of poly crisis and kind of all of this came together as we sat down and we said, wow, we really can take this further together and go into sort of a next phase. And the events that we didn't Singapore to do that.

First of all we convened scholars. And also government leaders and business leaders. We convened business leaders and there weren't as many business leaders involved in the study up until that point. We really [00:07:00] had a very interesting interactive event that we used a new concept called the World Cafe on ai.

Maybe I can talk about that later. We tried. That out. And our second event was actually through the American Chamber where I serve on the board for a number of years. I chair the board and in partnership with the CEO, who I think you've also had on this podcast. Oh yeah. Dr. San Lee. We hosted a, an another event for the CEO group.

There is a. CEO forum. And we brought a number of them together to send te sense test what had come out of the first event. And those two events really brought us so many interesting insights in the World Cafe on ai. We analyzed some of the output in real time and, yeah.

Really powerful. I think what was very powerful was hearing from such diverse leaders across government [00:08:00] as well as business and coming from, with perspectives across the region, but very global at the same time. 

Scott Allen: Sin, how about you? What do you, what observations do you have? I know you were very excited.

Cyn Cherrey: I think the combination of the intellectual capital that. Was brought together with ILA and CCL. Our partnership, as Elisa has mentioned, has grown over the years and bringing together these different perspectives because as we were talking about global leadership and what does that look like in the poly crisis work that Elisa and her team were doing?

It all converges on this time. This point in time where I say everything that was, is tripping over everything that is right in terms of geopolitical, turmoils, the intensifying disruptions the global challenges that are getting more and more complex. So as we talked [00:09:00] about this and. Bringing our two ways of looking at this together and then broadening it out to having these.

I think at least it was about 40 to 50 people in the room in this world Cafe on ai. It was like a world cafe on steroids, quite frankly. And as we talked, everybody engaged in the conversation, in the questions that we did, that we developed, and there were multiple things that came out. But I think. We zeroed in on about four key points that are really about the knowledge shifts that are taking place for global leaders overall.

Scott Allen: So talk about those four shifts. What were a few of those that were on the radar? 

Cyn Cherrey: Yeah, I think, and Elisa could jump in too, 'cause this is really our high level where we had the World Cafe and then also from the feedback [00:10:00] from the CEOs at the chamber lunch, which was also a very, profound experience to have them in the room.

But the four areas that came out was knowing your challenges, right? And the second being know what is possible, knowing what is possible. The third was about knowing your networks, and the fourth was about knowing your competence. So their knowledge shifts and talking about knowing your challenges.

Right now, there are so many different challenges that are taking place, right? What are the priorities of the priorities or as we talk about, is what you need to deal with today, but what really can you look at later down the road, even though they're all priorities, right? In every crisis. But you have to, in many ways, when you go through global crisis or when you go through a crisis like I did at Tulane with Hurricane Katrina, it's, you know it's all out there, but you have to focus on.

What do you know? [00:11:00] What do you need to do today and how are we gonna get done? 

And so I think this is an experience that leaders, especially corporate leaders, are really finding out is so important. So that was one of the aha moments that came out of it. I think the second one was, we always talk about aspirations, which are important.

And what we desire to do. But really it's more knowing what is possible, what is it what are the possibilities? But really what is it that we really need to do? And I love this. One of the individuals in the cafe talked about, leadership is about what's possible. She goes, I always thought it was about what's impossible.

And leaders do the impossible, but how do you really make meaning out of it and move it forward? So that was the second. And then the third is really this whole sense about leadership. As one [00:12:00]another person said out of it, said in our Singapore. Summit said, leadership has become more of a team sport.

Right? And it goes to the things that we talk about. 

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Cyn Cherrey: You have to collaborate, you have to partner, because of how nuanced it is and how complex it is. So the partnerships, the collaborations are so important in that piece. And then knowing your competence, I think it's really a matter of shaping.

It's different. And now, it's not necessarily the skillset, it's more about capacity and capabilities. Nice. 

Scott Allen: Okay, so Elisa, you, you just heard sin. Summarize, what would you like to underline? Bold. Augment what stands out for you. You could disagree with her. We could have like fireworks here on practical wisdom for leaders.

Really the whole all options are on the table. 

Cyn Cherrey: Yeah. 

Elisa Mallis: I fully agree, and I'm going to add [00:13:00] on that, even since these events, we have been interviewing leaders particularly across Europe and Asia and gathering additional insights. And I think that we're seeing some very interesting things.

I wanna share, one of the questions we ask when we're doing these interviews is. Asking leaders to look out to 2050. There seems to be so much kind of gloom and doom if we look at the news every day right now, that is, certain, and that's not just in the United States, particularly in the US but really, all over the world.

And the question is. If you look out to 2050 and things turned out better than expected, what did leaders get right? What did we get right? And I, I love this question. And so we've been asking it and also in events since that event that have taken place I've been asking this question and different things are coming out.

There is a theme in particular in some of the interviews we had here in Asia, that we got the ai right? And that [00:14:00] is. Certainly one very big piece, one theme that's coming up and, I saw this just getting to the end of the year right before the holidays, Saxo had these like outrageous predictions for 2026.

And there were a few interesting things there. And one of them was that we're going to have a Fortune 500 company appoint a. CEO that is an AI agent that will be making decisions related to budgets and logistics and even hiring and so on and so forth. And it's a bit of an outrageous prediction, however.

At some, in some sense, it doesn't feel farfetched. And so if we think about really in this, looking ahead and this idea of what did leaders get right? One thing that comes up a lot and came up in the conversation was culture. And, I think this isn't something new.

I think, Edgar Schein said the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. [00:15:00] And that has been coming up a lot in these conversations of, how do we come back to what's fundamentally human and, grow the capacity of the leader, not just their skills.

And one of the things that, you know Cynthia mentioned that's coming up a lot is leadership is becoming less about having all the answers. It's being able to say, I don't know. And in India, as we were hosting round tables last week, that was really coming up a lot where we do have more hierarchical structures in place.

So that was definitely coming up a lot. Another theme that I'm seeing coming out, and by the way, Scott, we're going to be putting out a. In the works, we have a longer report that actually has six trends at this point that come out of all this work. Nice. The some of the pieces that Cynthia mentioned, but more, building on it.

Another piece I see is the importance of balancing realism with vision and grounding people while inspiring them and, how do you do those two things? I think we had a pharma [00:16:00] leader in our round tables in. At the AmCham in Singapore that really brought this to life around the real challenges businesses facing, and yet how you need to inspire people and remain grounded and some of the very difficult realities.

I think that is very difficult for the. Leaders right now. And one other piece I'll mention that's come up in the recent conversations is that globalization is not dead. It's just far more complex and the just how interconnected some of the dynamics between countries are.

We can use the United States and China as an example. I actually lived in China before Singapore for a decade. I see that relationship, the interconnection far more complex. And how, as a leader do you deal with those more complex decisions in this almost sort of new flavor of GL globalization.

So I'll pause there as quite a few interesting things that we're gonna be further [00:17:00] exploring and putting into this report. 

Scott Allen: I love it. My. What I was thinking about. So as you were listing sin, as you were speaking and as Elisa you were talking about these different areas, I just keep coming back to polarities intentions.

We're managing all of these different tensions, perform and transform, like we need. We need to. Do our core business and we need to transform into what we're gonna become in the future. And how are we focusing on not only the culture and the people but also, and I also loved what you said about, look, we need to be inspirational and we need to be grounded.

So there's these both ends. There's these polarities that leaders, right now, it's a tightrope act. That's my perception is that kind of coming out in some of these discussions that they're feeling that. 

Cyn Cherrey: I think there's no question of that, Scott. And as Elisa was talking and you were, think of we have to optimize the tensions, right?

So how [00:18:00] do we optimize those tensions and leverage the opportunities, or even, this is part of, I think the challenge is how do we look at the future because the, how do we prepare now for the opportunities that we don't even know exist? It's like we have told college students for many years, 

Scott Allen: then you just broke up.

Can you say, don't even know exist? Okay. Just start there. Don't even know exist. 

Cyn Cherrey: Don't even know exist. And so for example, we always have been teaching college students that we're preparing you for jobs that. Careers that don't even exist today. So as a leader, that's what we also have to do. How do we prepare for what we don't even know down the road, right?

'cause we are becoming more complex and more interdependent. That's part of this challenge 

Scott Allen: that is hard. My son is a senior. He is looking at schools and it's. [00:19:00] $400,000 to go to Vanderbilt University and we don't even know what we're preparing them for. 

Cyn Cherrey: That's exactly right. 

Scott Allen: No.

Oh my gosh. To the two of you, I very much appreciate your time. Very much appreciate the work that you're doing. Anything else that you wanna highlight just to underscore or bold or underline with listeners, Elisa? 

Elisa Mallis: Yeah, I, and actually interestingly on our stream of work on poly crisis, the latest paper is all around graduate education and how.

To what extent it is preparing. And so that's a very interesting one. It's this era of multiple interconnected crises and how they put us leaders at all levels, young leaders in an ongoing state of uncertainty. And what that. Does. Also I think at that stage, that graduate education stage and how well leaders are being [00:20:00] prepared.

There's some interesting findings and recommendations there. One of the pieces that when we think about that and overall this work, human connection and doubling down on human connection is a theme that also I feel is very important at the end of the day. It's interesting what in. Many.

Industries is that, we're also needing to come back to basics of live events, for example, whether that's kind of concert sporting events while all the sort of virtual and AI and the technology is moving so quickly. There is that need to come back to the basics. And I think human connection plays a huge role in business.

We're hearing the importance of trust and how. With a phone call very complex things can happen more easily if there is trust, in in the relationship. And so for leaders. Ensuring that doesn't get [00:21:00] lost. And we, I think for younger leaders, establishing earlier on how to build those networks, those connections based on trust is very important.

With the pandemic, of course, for our younger, generation, we lost some of that human connectivity. And it does, I think, come up and emerge as quintessential, it emerges as what is going to also ensure that we get that future state in 2050. For. Humanity. So I think that doubling down on human connection is another piece I've been hearing a lot about and I hope will come with some recommendations.

And we're also gonna be including company practices in our report to really bring to life what other organizations to give up practical ideas, right? Of, what do we do and how do we. Tackle this. So I wanna end on Yeah. 2026 really being very important for us now to not lose sight of doubling down on human connection.

Scott Allen: Great. And [00:22:00] sen, as you reflect on the conversation we've had, what's the practical wisdom here that listeners should leave with? What do you think? 

Cyn Cherrey: A couple things. I think Elisa started to talk about it, right? This human connection. We've always thought about leadership and the theories of leadership as they've evolved as being human relational, many ways.

But I think what AI has done is it is bringing this back to the forefront. So I'd say there's a couple of things. One is this real focus on human-centered leadership. 

As we're thinking about it. The second is around wisdom as a skill in the sense that we really need to have the foresight as we think about these changes.

So wisdom and judgment become so much more important as skills that we need to have. 

Scott Allen: Yeah, 

Cyn Cherrey: capabilities, capacities. The other is authors of meaning. Think as we keep throwing this [00:23:00] sense of making meaning and making sense 'cause we've got some gaps right now. So how do we make meaning as we move forward?

But wisdom as a skill is gonna be very important moving forward. 

Scott Allen: That's music. All. That's my jam. Practical wisdom. 

Cyn Cherrey: That's your 

Scott Allen: jam. And so yes, let's end there. You all? 

Cyn Cherrey: There it is. 

Scott Allen: Thank you so much. For listeners, we'll have some resources in the show notes for you and Elisa Sin, thank you so much for being with me.

I really appreciate the conversation. Thanks for the work that you are doing. 

Cyn Cherrey: Right back 

Elisa Mallis: at you, Scott. Thank you, Scott. 

Cyn Cherrey: Thank you. 

Elisa Mallis: Thanks and thanks Scott for hosting not just us, but others from this work. And we hope it does bring more wisdom. 

Scott Allen: It is, it's spreading out there in the world as we speak.

Have a great day. You all be well. 

Elisa Mallis: Thank you. Thank you.